I’m always looking for a reason to talk about my dog because, well, I’m obsessed with him. I think I can use him to draw a good analogy of the importance of season-long scouting in your soybean fields. Let me put it like this: my dog is a living thing that I care for deeply. As he cannot talk, I am the only one who can advocate for him and his wellbeing. Just because my dog is getting old (he’s 10.5 but has had a number of serious health problems thus far in life), doesn’t mean I stop paying attention to him or stop caring for him.

Tar spot on corn is here to stay in Illinois.

Did you know that more than one-third of the food humans consume depend on pollinators for reproduction, i.e., fruit set? And when talking about flowering plants, three-quarters require pollinator intervention for reproduction. 

Granted, I know my audience here is primarily corn and soybean producers in Illinois. Corn plants are designed for pollen to fall on the silks, and soybean flowers are self-pollinating. So why worry about pollinators? 

It’s never too early to think about plant diseases!

There are few sure things in this great wide world of ours. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, gravity holds us down to the earth, and living things are susceptible to pests and pathogens. 

When you put your beans out in the field, there are numerous plant diseases than can wreak havoc in your field. However, the incidence and severity of a disease can be highly variable, and management can be tricky. 

Much of the 2020 crop has just been harvested, but it's never too early to discuss crop diseases in the forecast for 2021. 

Did you come here thinking you might actually get some idea of what diseases will prove problematic next year? Good. Am I going to give you specific diseases for which to watch out? No. But I do want to tell you about a concept that will make disease prediction in 2021 easier: the plant disease triangle. 

The year 2020 has been out-of-the-ordinary, to say the least. Illinois Extension is utilizing web-based program delivery methods on a larger scale than ever, which leads us to one of the very few silver linings of our current circumstances: increased access to programs across the state. 

The spring 2020 planting season season is moving right along, and as such, fields all over the state have great corn seedlings up and thriving. With the emergence of the new crop comes all of the concerns and worries that farmers must contend with throughout the growing season. Among those concerns should be corn nematodes. 

Illinois Extension's Commercial Agriculture team has been working to put together a new webinar series targeted towards those in production agriculture in the state of Illinois. With the uncertainty around the likelihood of face-to-face programming for the summer of 2020, the team wanted to work to ensure that we have a method of relaying useful and impactful information to the agricultural community of Illinois. 

“A ripple effect is a situation in which, like ripples expanding across the water when an object is dropped into it, an effect from an initial state can be followed outwards incrementally”- Wikipedia

The agriculture industry (farmers, agribusinesses, etc.) is experiencing a ripple effect. In this case, the object dropped into the water is a pandemic. That object is HUGE. The ripples from the pandemic are seemingly endless, eventually making their way to every industry and individual.

Planting season is right around the corner! With any hope, things will go much smoother this year than last year (although that's not a very high bar to pass). 

Continue to keep an eye on the weather! This includes not only what is going on in your area, but also monitoring the snowpack and melt in the upper Midwest and into Canada. This can greatly influence the water table and planting in Illinois. 

As a part of a multi-state effort throughout the Midwest, researchers from University of Illinois are looking for participants to partake in a focus group centered around conservation practices within the Flint/Henderson watershed (Mercer, Henry, Henderson, Warren, Knox, and Hancock counties). University of Illinois professor of agriculture economics, Dr. Ben Graming, has collaborated with faculty from Purdue and Iowa State University to conduct these series of focus groups to gather perspectives from farmers about conservation practices. 

Agriculture is a numbers game now more than any other time in history. Precision agriculture and the integration of technology and location services has given farmers heaps and heaps of data. Don't get me wrong, data are great. But what are you doing with all of those data? Are you able to extract meaningful information from all of the data that are generated in a growing season to help with decision making in the future? 

2019 is finally coming to an end, but that does not mean that your opportunities to continue learning about crop management from Extension have to! 

There are few different Extension programs for commercial agriculture towards the beginning of the new year to consider attending. 

Needless to say, we have had an extremely atypical growing season in 2019. A prolonged planting window due to relentless rains, with many fields not planted until June, have resulted in many higher-than-average grain moisture levels at harvest. Observing elevated harvest moisture on a widespread basis throughout Illinois can have some inadvertent ramifications for grain storage. Please consider this following hypothetical chain of events: 

Hello! My name is Chelsea Harbach and I am the new commercial agriculture Extension educator located at the Northwestern Illinois Research and Demonstration Center outside of Monmouth, Illinois.